Growth Mobile App
Bell Media
My Role
UX Designer — UX Design, UX Research, Information Architecture
Overview
While studying at the University of Waterloo, I enrolled into the Customer Experience Design course (BET 350).
As part of the final assignment, we were partnered with TD Labs to increase engagement with Generation Z customers.
After participating in a standard design sprint and through the data gained from user research, we came up with the Growth mobile app.
Team
Matthew Miller, UX Design Manager
Stacey Bolotin, Sr UX Designer
Daniel Lee, UX Designer
Timeline
September 2019 - Feb 2020
Introduction
For my Customer Experience Design course (BET 350) at the University of Waterloo, our clients at TD Lab presented my team and I with the task of creating a solution to increase Generation Z’s engagement in TD Bank’s various products and services.
Design Challenge: "How might TD better establish a value-based relationship with Generation Z?"
Initial Research
To kick start this tall task of a project, we conducted research to obtain an idea of Generation Z’s financial goals, experiences regarding goal achievement, and their banking habits. My team and I interviewed 5 peers and conducted an online survey which reached 40 respondents.
The research methods involved general banking questions followed by those related to investing in order to gain a better insight on the current relationship our target audience has with their bank. A quick breakdown of the data can be found below:
Collection of findings from research conducted.
The key takeaways from the surveys and interviews are as follows:
The vast majority of respondents (60%) have no experience with investing and only 37.5% of respondents use investing services with their banks/financial institutions.
Respondents on average tend to lean more towards being financially illiterate. It was discovered that there were zero respondents who described themselves as being very knowledgeable with regards to their financial literacy.
30% of respondents described themselves as having limited knowledge about investing while 17.5% of respondents reported receiving investing knowledge from their banks/financial institutions.
There were a number of respondents who expressed they would find it useful for banking apps to provide resources such as learning modules and user onboarding to teach users.
Our secondary studies have shown that Generation Z is enthusiastic towards saving up for big purchases, such as buying their first home, their education, vacations, and retirement. However, the bulk of Generation Z members have no experience as of yet with investing. Using this information, along with the lack of educational resources that banks currently offer, we have decided to tackle TD’s challenge from an investing perspective.
Customer Profile & Journey Map
To learn more about investing from our target audience’s viewpoint, my team and I created a customer profile/persona and journey map using the data found in our initial research. These were used to gain a better understanding of a customer’s emotions throughout the investing process while bringing focus to the pains and gains of the overall journey. The emotional experience of the customer journey map was based off of my team’s assumptions at first but were soon after cleared with our survey findings.
Customer Profile/Persona
Summary of Miranda’s Customer Profile
Short-term goal: Purchasing a car
Long-term goals: Paying off tuition after graduation and buying her first home
Wants to be independent in making her first big purchase alone however, she is willing to seek help in order to achieve her goals
Obstacles included a lack of financial literacy and steady income
First iteration of Customer Journey Map
Finished Customer Journey Map
The customer journey map helped us to empathize with the customer and determine the common pain points that Generation Z experiences when investing. The main pains that we aimed to resolve were:
How customers experience losses in their investment
Understanding fluctuations in the stock market; knowing when to stick and when to quit
Design Sprint
Dot-voting Exercise
After gaining the insight from the customer profile and journey map, my team and I participated in a Google Design Sprint to help us build the prototype for our solution. Through various design exercises such as dot-voting, Crazy 8’s, and rapid prototyping, we were able to combine aspects of our collective ideas and produce a mobile product that we believed would solve the challenge at hand. Unfortunately, due to restrictions with time, the sprint never reached the testing phase and went straight to presentation with our client (TD Labs) after completion of the prototype.
The Solution: Growth
Growth addresses the knowledge gap that Gen-Z members have with regards to investing by providing users with valuable investing experience while teaching the fundamentals of financial growth. It not only allows users to invest their money, but they can take part in investment simulations that will provide a comparable experience in the case they feel that they are not ready to invest with their own finances.
Onboarding
It was found that Gen-Z appreciated it when brands allowed for customization, as it offered them a unique experience specifically catered to their needs. To deliver this special experience, we took it upon ourselves to create an onboarding process that offered custom recommendations to each user.
Onboarding Screens
Homepage
Once fully onboarded, users will find a customized feed of information regarding their investment accounts, financial goals, simulated investments, and accomplishments. Growth also offers a friendly bot that provides users with encouragement, support and recommendations with investing. The bot will analyze the users current investments and propose a series of options when investments are performing well.
Financial Literacy Library
To aid with Gen-Z’s lack of financial literacy, Growth is equipped with learning modules composed of short articles and videos that users can access to improve their knowledge on investing and personal finance.
Social and Gamification
While working on this project, we discovered that investing was not a social topic. We decided to encourage discussion within the topic of investing by adding a social aspect to the app through an events section and a leaderboard with a gamification feature.
Conclusion & Takeaways
In conclusion, Growth was a huge learning experience as it brought to light the customer side of the experience. It completely changed the approach that I take when designing experiences and I believe it made myself think more empathetically as well. If I were to change the way that my team and I approached this challenge, it would be to cutback on the number of features. I believe that we were overly ambitious with our solution and should’ve simplified it especially with the short timeline of 12 weeks. Having the opportunity to run user-testing sessions would’ve been very helpful as well.
